Vice President, Product Management

DISHER is currently partnering with an organization that is evolving from a logistics services company into a technology-enabled services company. Technology, data, and AI increasingly are determining not only how efficiently they operate, but what services they can offer, how differentiated those services are, and the value they can create for their customers.

In this role, you will build and own the product strategy across their technology and technology-enabled service portfolio. The VP will establish the 2-3 year vision, roadmaps, investment priorities, and commercialization strategy. You must be equally comfortable defining the future of an AI-enabled software product, determining how technology should enable an operational service, and deciding whether they should build, buy, or partner for a capability.

You will report to the Chief Technology & Marketing Officer and have direct visibility into executive and board-level product and investment discussions.

What you will own:

Product & Portfolio Strategy:

Define the 2-3 year product strategy and integrated portfolio roadmap.
Develop a clear strategic thesis for each area: the customer problem they are solving, where the organization should differentiate, what capabilities are required, how the offering should evolve, and where they should invest or stop investing.
Translate strategy into actionable roadmaps with clear priorities, sequencing, dependencies, expected outcomes, and measure of success.
Portfolio investment prioritization across competing customer, commercial, operational, and technology demands.

Go-to-market Product:

Lead their first go-to-market product evolution from initial commercial launch into a durable product line spanning decision intelligence, predictive analytics, benchmarking, and executive-facing insight.
Own product strategy, roadmap, packaging, user experience, customer discovery, adoption, and product KPIs.
Work closely with Data, Engineering and Architecture to turn analytics, AI, and model capability indo decisions that customers trust and value.
Stay directly engaged with the customers to understands the decisions they are trying to make, validate product direction, assess adoption and determine where the product creates enough value to change customer behavior and earn continued investment.

Technology-Enabled Service Productization:

Build this capability to systematically turn operational expertise and customer problems into differentiated commercial offerings.
Identify operational capabilities, unmet customer needs and emerging technologies that could become new or enhanced offerings. Lead those opportunities from customer validation through business case, technology strategy, build/buy/partner decision, offering definition, commercialization and launch.

Service-Enabling Technology:

Own the product strategy for the technologies required to enable and differentiate their service portfolios. Define the technology strategies required to support the services as they mature and scale. Determine where they should build capabilities internally, purchase technology or partner with third parties rather than defaulting to custom development.
Identify how their technology should evolve by incorporating new tools, data, integrations, automation and AI that allows them to compete on intelligence, visibility and speed as well as operational execution.
Own data-product strategy and the identification and prioritization of customer-facing AI use cases. Ensure AI is applied to meaningful customer or business problems rather than treated as a technology objective on its own.

Product Management Discipline:

Build a pragmatic, high-accountability product management operating model focused on better decisions and outcomes not process for process's sake.
Establish the disciplines they need around customer discovery, Voice of Customer, roadmapping, prioritization, product metrics, release planning and commercialization
Raise the organization's product management capability from managing requirements and individual initiatives to owning customer problems, strategy, adoption and business value.
Lead and develop the existing product management organization, including the Sr. Director of Product Management, who will report to this role.

Customer & Commercial Leadership:

Develop direct relationships with strategic customers and prospects and use those relationships to shape product strategy, validate opportunities and understand where they can create differentiated value.
Represent the organization in executive-level customer conversations and be capable of moving comfortably between strategic business discussions and detailed product conversations.
Partner closely with Sales and Marketing on positioning, packaging, pricing, commercialization and launch.
Own product adoption and ensure launch is treated as the beginning of product accountability rather than the end.

Executive Leadership:

Work across Engineering, Architecture, Data, Infrastructure, Security, Operations, Customer Success, Sales, Marketing and Finance to turn product strategy into measurable business and customer outcomes.
Present portfolio strategy, roadmap, investment recommendations, product performance and major tradeoffs to executive leadership.

What success looks like:

Within the first 12 months, we expect this leader to have established:

A clearly articulated 2–3 year portfolio strategy with a strategy outlined per technology product / product area.
An actionable roadmap for each major product and service-technology area, with clear investment priorities, customer outcomes, dependencies and measures of success.
A repeatable productization model for taking an operational capability or customer problem from opportunity through validation, business case, technology strategy, offering definition and launch.
Clear product KPIs and adoption measures that show whether their products are creating meaningful customer and commercial value.
A portfolio prioritization discipline that allows leadership to make explicit investment choices and confidently stop or deprioritize work that is not earning continued investment.
A stronger product management organization capable of owning strategy and outcomes

What will make you successful:

Significant product leadership experience (10+ years) with direct ownership of product strategy, multi-year roadmaps, prioritization and commercialization.
Experience creating product strategy rather than simply inheriting and executing against an established strategy.
Experience taking a product, internal capability or service from concept through customer validation, business case, commercialization and market launch.
Experience building technology-enabled offerings where software, data, workflow and operational capabilities come together to create customer value.
Strong commercial judgment, including experience with pricing, packaging, customer adoption, business cases and product investment decisions.
Experience working as a peer to senior Engineering and Architecture leaders and making difficult tradeoffs among customer demand, product priorities, technical debt and long-term platform sustainability.
Experience with mission-critical or legacy technology environments where modernization must happen without destabilizing the business that depends on the platform today.
Meaningful experience with AI/ML-enabled products and the ability to distinguish commercially valuable AI applications from technology experimentation. Experience with generative or agentic AI is strongly preferred.
The ability to work directly with enterprise customers, uncover the underlying problem behind stated requirements and translate customer insight into product strategy.
Executive-level communication skills and experience presenting product strategy, investment recommendations and tradeoffs to senior leadership and boards.
Must have the current and continuing right to work in the United States of America without restrictions or expirations.

The leadership profile:

This role requires a player-coach product executive. You should be equally comfortable developing a portfolio strategy with executive leadership, working through a roadmap with a product manager, challenging an operational assumption, meeting directly with a customer, debating a build-versus-buy decision with Engineering and Architecture, and personally getting into the details when an important product decision requires it.

You will likely thrive in this role if you:

Create structure in ambiguous environments rather than waiting for perfect organizational clarity.
Have strong strategic instincts but translate strategy quickly into priorities, roadmaps and action.
Use product-management disciplines pragmatically rather than introducing process for its own sake.
Can influence and challenge Operations, Sales, Engineering and other senior stakeholders without needing those functions to report to you.
Are comfortable making recommendations with imperfect information and changing direction when evidence warrants it.
Understand AI deeply enough to identify where it creates differentiated customer value — and where it does not.
Can operate effectively with a relatively lean team and remain personally engaged in important product work.

DISHER

Vice President, Product Management

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